Spanish Castle to White Night

Spanish Castle to White Night

The Race Around the World

Mark Chisnell

Text-only edition published by Mark Chisnell at Smashwords

Illustrated edition originally published by:

Dakini Media

Copyright VEMUK 2009

Mark Chisnell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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The Story

The Volvo Ocean Race runs for 37,000 miles through 10 stages across the world’s seas and oceans. It is raced in the planet’s fastest and most demanding monohull, the Volvo Open 70, capable of sustaining speeds of well over 30 knots. The boat and the course make this the most exacting of all crewed sailboat races, a microscopic examination of the sailing skill, seamanship, stamina and strategy of the 11 men aboard each yacht.

This book charts the story of some of the 88 men who left Alicante in October 2008 to win that race. It follows them through the next nine months as they endured and enjoyed every possible emotion, their human story intertwined with the raw elements of nature and the extraordinary technology on which their success, and sometimes even their survival depended.

Other Titles by Mark Chisnell

Non-Fiction

Risk to Gain

‘What it does brilliantly is get under the skin of what it is like to live and breathe a Whitbread Race.’

Tim Jeffery, The Daily Telegraph

Fiction

The Defector

‘This is a remarkable thriller – chillingly violent, full of tension and with a very original ending.’

Publishing News

The Wrecking Crew

‘A real ripping yarn... begging to be made into an all-action film.’

Qantas in-flight magazine

‘My fave books on this race [Barcelona World Race 2011] have been ‘The Millennium Trilogy’ by Stieg Larsson and Mark Chisnell's 'The Defector' and 'The Wrecking Crew' – all brilliant.’

Dee Caffari

Contents

Spanish Castle

Running Repairs

Real Life

Dragon Kings

Forty Days

Broken Rhythm

Collision Crossing

White Night

Endgame

Spanish Castle

By the early afternoon of 29 October 2008, the racing yacht Ericsson 4 had been on world record pace for almost 36 hours. Fourteen tons of Volvo Open 70 in a relentless charge across the South Atlantic, driven by 35 knots of wind pressing on hundreds of square metres of high-technology fabric.

They had first punched through the old mark – 562.96 nautical miles in a day – in the early hours of the morning. The mileage eased briefly after breakfast, but then it clicked relentlessly upwards once again. Now they were closing on a new barrier – 600 miles in a day, sailing at an average 25 knots: that meant 25 nautical miles for each and every one of the 24 hours. This was new territory.

At the wheel just after midday was Stu Bannatyne, the watch captain. He had held the same position aboard the 2001–02 Volvo Ocean Race winner, illbruck. Bannatyne is softly spoken. On first meeting, you might think him shy, or aloof. Not at all the kind of a man you imagine flying through freezing southern oceans at maniacal speeds, with the lives of everyone on board in his hands. But the quiet reserve hides iron resolve and a single-minded focus: useful qualities when the slightest hesitation can spell disaster.

Bannatyne’s first trip away from his native New Zealand was to the 1989 ISAF World Youth Championships in Canada. It wasn’t so different from home, though there was plenty to distract a curious teenager on his first trip abroad. But none of it had any effect on Bannatyne, who came away with the single-handed title. In doing so he joined a pantheon of sailing luminaries that includes triple Olympic gold medallist Ben Ainslie, and three-time America’s Cup winner Russell Coutts.

Now Stu Bannatyne was applying all that focus, constantly bracing every nerve and muscle against the elemental battering. The elevated helming position provided a great view in daylight, but left him exposed to everything that the ocean could hurl at the boat. Protection was afforded by a survival suit, a windsurfing helmet with a full face visor, and he was tethered to a strong line, the jackstay, that runs transversely across the boat by the wheels.

There were just three men on deck with him; two on the sheets, and one at the double-handed winch pedestal, grinding the sails in response to the commands. Those commands were the only words spoken; the howl of wind and waves and the screech of winches allowed for nothing else. This was sailing at the very edge of human endeavour, and they all knew it.

They were sailing the boat at the fastest possible angle to the wind. Now, the wind shifted slightly, forcing them into the waves. Instead of skipping across the back of each one at a steady 26 or 27 knots, Bannatyne was forced to sail down the face, which accelerated them to a speed that would have earned him a fine in an urban area, not to mention the opprobrium of his wife, Amanda. Then the boat ploughed itself into the back of the wave in front, plunging the foredeck into green water and washing a white wall of boiling foam and spray back down the boat.

If the motion was bad before, now it was impossible. Down below, men were trying to follow the normal routines of any other day: eat, sleep, wash, dress. But this was not a normal day – this might be a day that people would talk about for years to come, the day when Ericsson 4 went through the 600-mile barrier. And then there was a bang.

Eighteen days earlier, eight Volvo Open 70s had left the race village in Alicante to the cheers of tens of thousands of spectators. They had started the first leg of the 2008–09 Volvo Ocean Race, bound for Cape Town, South Africa, on a grim, grey day. The wind was blowing hard out of the north-east – more North Sea winter than Mediterranean autumn. The fleet sailed a lap of the bay in sight of the tenth-century Castle of Santa Bárbara, before turning south-west towards the Cabo de Palos, the first of two capes they would have to negotiate on their way to the Straits of Gibraltar, and then the Atlantic.

No one was particularly surprised when Ericsson 4 led the way down the coast. They came to the race with impeccable credentials, part of a two-boat operation, with sister ship Ericsson 3 also racing. The group behind the team had been involved with the race since the 1980s. They won it with Team EF in 1997–98, were second in 2001–02, but in the previous race they had slipped to fifth, with Ericsson as a sponsor.

The giant communications technology company was eager for another go. This time they started early, with the designer of the winning boat from the last race, the Argentinean Juan Kouyoumdjian. They hired a world-class crew, led by Brazilian Torben Grael, who has an enviable collection of Olympic medals (two gold, two bronze and a silver), as well as having led a Brazilian team to third place in the previous race.

They weren’t the only ones with a score to settle. Telefónica Blue and Telefónica Black were the second of the race’s two-boat teams. Led by five-time Volvo veteran, Bouwe Bekking – sports and technical director as well as skipper of the Blue boat – their ill-starred 2005–06 Volvo Ocean Race had opened with a first-night structural problem which forced them to retire from leg one. A tragic conclusion was narrowly avoided when their yacht, movistar, had finally been abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean on leg seven, after the keel structure had suffered a dangerous failure.

Jonathan Swain, who had climbed into the liferaft with Bekking on that occasion, was back as watch captain aboard Telefónica Blue for 2008–09. They were just a couple of hours out from Alicante when Swain took the wheel. They had a small spinnaker up and a reef in; conditions were fresh, but not frightening – as the saying would have it. But almost immediately Swain lost control of the boat, rounding up into the wind, broaching, sails flapping. He heaved on the wheel and got her back on track, only to lose it again. Bekking frowned; his instructions to Swain had been to take it easy. They needed to settle into the race before pushing hard.

Something wasn’t right, and it didn’t take long to find the problem. The tiller arm – the strut that connects the rudder to the steering gear and the wheels on deck – was broken, and the starboard rudder was flapping uselessly. They had limited control with the port rudder, which was fine when the boat was upright. But when Telefónica Blue heeled over on to her starboard side, the good rudder came out of the water and they quickly lost control. Fortunately, once they were past Cabo de Palos they had the option to sail back towards the coast. That put the working rudder in the water, and also got them into calmer conditions, so they could work on the repair.

They dug the boatbuilding spares out of the bag – not something they had imagined doing so soon after the start. It seemed as if Bekking and Swain’s first-night jinx had struck again. But this was a great deal less serious than the problems of 2005, and five hours later – although they weren’t convinced of the durability of the repair – they had full control of the boat.

The tiller arms had been a problem earlier in their preparation, so two brand-new, redesigned units had been delivered to their facility in Alicante. But, because they were an unknown quantity, they had decided not to fit them before the start. Now that decision had come back to haunt them. They could call into a port and swap them, but that meant taking a 12-hour penalty, the minimum time a team was allowed to suspend racing to seek help.

Bouwe Bekking and navigator Simon Fisher pored over the charts and weather maps to find the most efficient spot, and chose the Bay of Gibraltar. Decision made, they pulled into Algeciras on the evening of Sunday 12 October. Their support team met them with a van full of equipment, and sent the sailors to a local hotel. Swain reflected afterwards that it had been a strange sensation, lying in a comfortable bed, hours after they should have left shore-side comforts behind for the three-week race to South Africa.

In Swain’s case, the journey was a kind of homecoming. Brought up in Durban, on South Africa’s east coast, Swain was born to English parents, not long after they emigrated to their new home. He has subsequently proved no less prone to wanderlust himself, and now lives in Florida, with his American wife Cary and their two children. He stuck around in South Africa just long enough to get an education and complete his compulsory military service, and then headed for the States, where friends had told him he could earn a living as a sailor. And they were right. Starting from nothing, Swain had risen to the very top of the sport.

By 7am the next morning the crew was back at the dock, where the support team was giving the boat a final clean, ready to go. They motored out to where they had suspended racing and, exactly 12 hours later, pulled up the sails and set off in pursuit of Ericsson 4, who led the fleet over 100 miles away.

It had been rather different a week earlier. Telefónica Blue topped the podium in the opening in-port racing with a brilliant performance. In the light winds they were unstoppable on all points of sailing, as Swain put it afterwards. But this was a marathon, not a 100-metre sprint. And Bouwe Bekking made it clear to the team that even after that triumph there should be no question of complacency. In short order, they had reaped both the advantages and disadvantages of having their training base in Alicante. Dominant in the local conditions, they lacked the time spent sailing in the stronger winds and waves more common in the Atlantic, which might have led them to fix the tiller arm problem before the race started.

It had all been very different indeed almost four decades previously. When Colonel Bill Whitbread and Admiral Otto Steiner RNSA (Royal Naval Sailing Association) had had their idea of a crewed yacht race round the world, it certainly hadn’t included in-port racing. But like many good ideas, it had its genesis in a pub: the Still and West on Portsmouth waterfront where, legend has it, the pair brewed up the notion of the race. It was a different world back then. A dozen men had just walked on the moon, but not many more had sailed a yacht successfully through the southern ocean and round Cape Horn. Steiner and Whitbread proposed a fully crewed race through those same waters.

Seventeen yachts accepted the challenge and turned up at HMS Vernon, a Portsmouth naval base, in the autumn of 1973. This early version of the modern race village was just an encampment of pay phones, sailmakers’ tents and caravans selling yacht gear. The boats were loaded with fresh food, wine, real bunks and dining tables. They were mostly privately owned or entered by the armed services, and the crews were largely amateur. Setting a trend, some were more ready than others. Burton Cutter was still being built as she crossed the start line. Fourteen boats finished, but three men died: Paul Waterhouse went overboard